Strade bianche 2 marzo 2012
This is an exciting week. On Saturday there will be the Strade Bianche 2012 professional bike race.
Some videos here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OG0VCFCj04
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgpcxulbHKE
This is the pro-version of L'Eroica - a bike race that I did myself in October. There are some differences:
190 km (estimated time 5.5 hours)
All carbon bikes
Starts in Gaiole in Chianti and ends in Piazza del Campo in the centre of Siena
c. 100 top pro-riders
Amateur race
205 km (took me 16 hours 40 minutes!)
Steel bike - no carbon allowed, no clipless pedals, all bikes must be made pre-1987, bikes must have gear shifters on the downtube
Starts and ends in Gaiole in Chianti
c. 4000 amateur riders
This year it will be covered on Gazzetta.it - the main sports paper in Italy, even with some live streaming.
http://www.gazzetta.it/Speciali/StradeBianche/it/
It is a real oddity of a bike race. The season can roughly be distributed into the big three grand tours: Tour de France (July), the Giro D'Italia (May) and La Vuelta Espagna (September). These are mega races - each is over three weeks. There are smaller tours which last one or maybe two weeks, including the Tour of Britain which is getting grander now, and then there are the classics. These are single day races and include: Milano - San-Remo (in a couple of weeks time), Paris - Roubaix and Liege - Bastogne - Liege. The Strade Bianche is new, starting in 2007, and is based on L'Eroica - the amateur race that was instigated originally to preserve Tuscany's classic (for classic read "freakin' painful" and annoying, let alone dirty!) white roads (strade bianche) - which has been going for quite a while. The course is a freak - lots of strade sterrata - unpaved and broken roads, with terrible hills throughout. FOr example, the climb up to my house takes in two parts that are up to 22%!
Of course, it is sponsored by Papa Siena - the bank Monte dei Paschi - the world's oldest bank and the single unit keeping Siena rolling and it's prices high. Anyway - it's wonderful and something that I am really looking forward to - and I have not been looking forward to very much recently!
Sadly, I have missed the entry to L'Eroica this year :( Last year I entered about 2 months after the entries opened - this year the entries were full within 1 day. Ratbags! Of course, that doesn't stop me just riding my bike on the course!
Even more excitingly - it actually comes past our house a few km from the end. This leaves me in a dire quandary - should I watch it here come past our house, or should we watch it in the square? It passes our house about 10 minutes from the finish so if we watch it from home we will not be in time to watch the final part - ooh arh - decisions decisions!
I will ride up to Gaiole to watch it kick off, and then will chase it a little bit to see some more of it certainly.
The weather is getting nice too - today when I left the office, at a prompt 17:15, it was 17C, beautifully sunny and as I drove along our street there was the official gazzetta.it team car driving along our road. Awesome - I cannot wait!!
Some other blog posts on this:
http://xxcmag.com/archives/5340
http://www.cyclingnews.com/races/strade-bianche-2012/strade-bianche/preview
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